Anura PR Team
Stopping PPC ad fraud is simple: implement a click fraud solution on your owned and operated websites. But before you go spend a dollar, there are a few things you should consider. Do you have a major or minor click fraud problem? Once you determine without a doubt that you have major impact from click fraud, how much spend is it actually draining? Once you’re sure of the level of the problem, then you are in the best position to act. The flow of solving your fraud should look like this: Confirm the fraud → Determine Financial Impact → Stop the immediate Source → Protect your landing pages → Prevent fake conversions from training ad algorithms → Deploy Ongoing Detection.
Once you determine without a doubt that you have a click fraud problem, how much spend is it actually draining? Once you’re sure of the level of the problem, then you are in the best position to act. The flow of solving your fraud should look like this: Confirm the fraud → Determine Financial Impact → Stop the immediate Source → Protect your landing pages → Prevent fake conversions from training ad algorithms → Deploy Ongoing Detection.
The right ad fraud tool can perform every step of this process, but again prior to purchase the first two steps are crucial to do on your own.
Confirm the Problem Before Making Changes
First, dig into your data. Without a dedicated ad fraud or click fraud prevention tool, you must dig into your data. Note that no single data point below proves click fraud and, as we will discuss, some signals are significantly stronger than others. Some things to consider:
- Are you seeing traffic from unusual geographic locations? If your ad campaign is supposed to target the US, but you are seeing large volumes of traffic from Asia, this should give you an indication that something is wrong.
- Are you seeing spikes in bounce rates? High bounce rates could just mean that your content isn’t relevant enough to keep visitors on the page, or it could mean you are getting an influx of bots.
- Are your click-through rates spiking? This can be a more likely indicator of PPC ad fraud traffic. If you are seeing higher CTRs with low visitor durations, this can mean bots are landing on your site and going from page to page. When you look at the data, you should have the feeling of “Whoa, these visitors are moving through our pages faster than a person could read them.”
- Is your sales team complaining about spam leads? Leads that are outright spam or people who say “they never filled out a form” can be a great indicator of PPC ad fraud. Spam leads in particular are a dead giveaway that your ads are being targeted.
- Are you seeing traffic from similar devices or networks? If you’re seeing high volumes of visitors using the same browsers or networks, especially if something seems out of place (like if you are seeing a lot of traffic from an outdated version of Safari) this makes the presence of PPC ad fraud much more likely.
You have a problem, how much of your budget is being wasted?
Once you have confirmed that PPC ad fraud is affecting your ads, determine the monetary cost. Obviously, any fraud or waste on your budget is bad, but click fraud solutions cost money and you need to determine the waste to figure out which tool is the best for you. If you’re only seeing a small amount of fraud or if your ROI is good, then the problem might not be worth paying to fix. However, for high value keywords, large ad budgets (ex: over $50k/month), huge volumes of fraud traffic or industries that require higher level compliance; the risks are worth mitigating almost regardless of the cost. You should think of click fraud as reputation damage. If you’re selling traffic or leads, what is protecting your clients worth to you? If you’re driving conversions internally, what is protecting your budget and your marketing team’s reputation worth to you?
Additionally, knowing the real cost of ad fraud tells you the level of protection you need. If you’re losing less than $5k a month to click fraud, cheaper solutions may be fine. If you’re losing $10k or more though, you may want to look at more specialized protection.
A simple way to calculate fraud is:
Estimated fraudulent spend = fraudulent clicks × average CPC
If you want to dive further, the cost reaches beyond just the budget.
True cost of fraud = fraudulent spend + wasted sales/marketing resources + lost conversion data + potential revenue impact
Stop PPC Ad Fraud Immediately
As we found out at the top, the best way to stop PPC ad fraud is to protect your pages and ads with a fraud solution. A quality ad fraud solution is one that:
- implements a script or code on the webpage
- identifies traffic in real time
- gives you the power to block or redirect based on your criteria
- create an exclusion audience that can be used across multiple platforms
- is TAG or MRC certified.
The best solutions take this a step further and send blocked traffic to your ad platform to automatically build exclusion lists that stop bots and fraudsters from seeing your ads again.
This is where the “how” becomes important. When considering solutions, you want to ensure they identify and have the ability to block in real time, that they can create exclusion lists for your ad platforms, and that they have an accuracy guarantee. Just cutting off the source of your current fraud is plugging a hole, but it doesn’t stop the leaks. Your ad platform’s conversion data have already been corrupted, and your ads are still vulnerable to the same fraudsters that corrupted you in first place. Ongoing protection, when done correctly, will stop your PPC fraud in the immediate, start feeding powerful exclusion data to your ad platform to stop those fraudsters from seeing your ads going forward while also optimizing for only true conversions.
The first step to solving your PPC problem is to get your traffic analyzed to determine how much fraud is hiding in your campaigns. Most fraud solutions will offer this for free in order to help you understand your problem. Best case, trial multiple tools and compare where they agree and where they differ, and make a judgement call on who is most accurately catching your fraud. Then, ask the false positives question. Stopping your click fraud is important, but not at the expense of blocking real, potential conversions. Solutions should have a guarantee that they stand behind for not falsely classifying real traffic as fraud, which takes profits right out of your pockets.
Ultimately, make the choice that works best for your business to protect your budget from being wasted on bots and fraudsters.
Unsure where to go next or how to figure out how much fraud is hiding in your PPC campaigns? Start with a free traffic quality assessment to see how much fraud you really have.
